A judge has refused to allow a Muslim woman to stand trial in a full-length burqa as he said it would be possible for another person to enter the dock pretending to be her.
Judge Peter Murphy told the 21-year-old defendant from Hackney in east London that he would not allow her to enter a plea in court until she showed her face.
Gawker reports on the case of New York-based data scientist Aditya Mukerjee, who the US airline Jet Blue refused to allow to join his flight to Los Angeles earlier this month.
It would appear that airline staff, who mistook him for a Muslim, were dissatisfied with Mukerjee’s answers to questions such as “We have some female flight attendants. Would you be able to follow their instructions?”
Aditya Mukerjee has blogged about his experience in a post titled “Don’t Fly During Ramadan”.
A Roxbury man dressed in what cops called “Middle Eastern garb” was arrested after he dropped his chocolate milk under a bus yesterday – sparking a bomb scare, but prompting his sister and a national Islamic advocacy group to question whether the charges are justified.
Amar Ibrahim, 27, was charged by transit police with littering, interfering with public transportation and disorderly conduct after the 9:30 a.m. incident led to the evacuation of a No. 66 bus in Brigham Circle and drew a bomb squad response, transit police said.
“Chocolate milk? Chocolate milk?” said a woman who identified herself as Ibrahim’s sister. “I’m just wondering, how does chocolate milk become a bomb?”
Muslim organizations in Quebec are criticizing Agnès Maltais, the provincial minister responsible for the Status of Women, for asking the Canadian government to bar some invited guests from entering the country as speakers at a Muslim youth conference. Maltais wrote a letter to her federal counterpart, Kellie Leitch, calling the speakers “radical Islamists” who don’t respect equality between men and women.
On its website, the conference organizers – a group calling itself Collectif 1ndépendance – says that it will invite international speakers to “share knowledge on religious affairs with young Quebec Muslims.” The event is set to take place at Montreal’s Palais des congrès Sept. 7-8.
President of the Muslim Council of Montreal, Salam Elmenyawi, says Maltais should have contacted conference organizers before going to the federal government. “They jumped to conclusions before listening to both sides,” said Elmenyawi. “I think [Maltais] should have tried to have a meeting with them, and try to get an explanation to what she has read, and the concerns that she has about the treatment of women and the fact about education of women.”
Mosques and Muslim organisations in London have been sent Islamophobic DVDs containing highly offensive material.
They were received around the time of the Muslim holiday Eid and contain a mixture of insults to the Prophet Muhammad, a pornographic film and news footage about extremism. Some of the DVDs were addressed to “His Wonderous Cleric of Islam” making it initially appear to contain something positive.
Owen Jones responds to Nick Cohen’s Spectator article defending Richard Dawkins, in which Cohen accuses Dawkins’ critics of cowardice for refusing to join him in attacking Islam.
Jones concludes: “Nick Cohen concludes that one day there will be a reckoning. Yes, there certainly will be. In past eras, other communities faced pandemic bigotry in Britain: like Irish people and Jewish people. History has judged kindly those who challenged such prejudice. It has not been so kind to those who failed to do so. Those few of us with a public voice who defend Muslims from bigoted generalisations are currently fighting an unpopular battle. But it the right thing to do, and history will absolve us.”
A warden has been suspended after allegedly telling two Muslim women they could not pray in a park. An investigation has been launched after the women claimed that were left terrified and humiliated by the incident in Ireland.
Manguard Plus, which is contracted by Dublin City Council to enforce park by-laws, has apologised and launched a full investigation into the incident. Bill Brown, managing director, said he is trying to contact the women who he admitted had been asked to “move” on the day.
“I can confirm an employee has been suspended on foot of an incident that occurred on August 10,” said Mr Brown, who is trying to determine exactly what words were used. “Whatever the guard said it was contrary to his training and contrary to his instruction. There is nothing to prevent any kind of praying in a park. We are completely at fault,” he added.
As we noted in our report of the jailing of Geoffrey Ryan over an attack on the Al Falah Islamic Centre in Braintree, he is an admirer of Bonni Benstock-Install, the crazed Islamophobe who runs the Bare Naked Islam blog. It appears that this admiration is reciprocated.
The mosque at Cognac, in southwestern France, suffered a graffiti attack on Monday night, Charente Libre reports. The slogan “à mort les bougnoules” (death to the wogs) was written on the door of the women’s entrance and a Christian cross drawn on the wall. Small posters with pig’s heads were scattered on the steps along with pieces of ham and sausage meat. Police are also examining sheets of paper with racist messages printed on them that were left at the scene.
As part of a proposed programme for his party’s candidates in next year’s municipal elections, mayor of Puy-en-Velay and UMP vice-president Laurent Wauquiez has put forward a “pacte de laïcité“, which he claims would further the fight against “communalism”. It would include a commitment to ban the provision of different meals in school canteens.
This goes beyond a refusal to provide halal or kosher meals for Muslim or Jewish students. As the Collectif contre l’Islamophobie points out, most parents don’t ask for the substitution of specific school meals adapted to their religious requirements, but simply ask that non-halal or non-kosher meat should not be served to their children.